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Static File Hosting Doesn’t Have To Be So… Static

A huge high-five and welcome to Netlify for the sponsorship this week.

If you haven’t heard of Netlify, the big thing you should know is that it’s web hosting, but more than that. It’s web hosting with the developer workflow squarely at heart. You can spin up a site on Netlify in literally seconds. One way is through their robust CLI. Another way, that I find very comfortable (and just did the other day), is to log into the Netlify web interface, create a new site, and connect a Git repo to it. Plus I can give it a command that will run my site’s build process when I push to master. Now anything I push up goes live on my website, which is HTTPS and on a CDN. Uh, wow. Of course, I can also point a custom domain name at Netlify and now we’re cooking with gas.

The JAMstack is at the heart of Netlify. It’s static file hosting, because static file hosting is super fast and secure. It means you can build your site with all kinds of fun, powerful, modern site generators like Hugo, Gatsby, Metalsmith, or 11ty. The site I spun up myself was my own custom thing with a Gulp build process that ran Sass and Nunjucks.

Try spinning up a Gatsby site right now!

Static sites aren’t just HTML-only zero-interactivity stone statues.

In fact, I think static sites are one of the ingredients to the larger world of serverless technology, in which functionality is handled by services that are perfect for the job.

Netlify knows this, of course, so they’ve released has some brand spanking new features that allow you to add interactivity and functionality to your site:

Form Handling

Just add a netlify attribute to the <form>, configure where you want the redirection and email notifications to go, and you’re set. You don’t have to write any server-side code or JavaScript. Even blast that data over to Zapier to integrate with a million other web services. They don’t inject JavaScript to make this work – it’s handled at the CDN level.

You can also receive and manage submissions in your Netlify dashboard, so this can be yet another thing that brings together site management under one roof.

Built-in AWS Lambda Functions

JavaScript functions are designed to handle requests. Does your site need to trigger a Slack message? Send an SMS through Twilio? Process data? Now you can host your cloud functions right in the same repo as your site and Netlify will handle pushing them over to AWS Lambda for you. You don’t have to configure anything or even bother setting up your own AWS account.

Plus, your functions benefit from the power of Deploy Previews and rollbacks. As in, your functions live in your version control along with the rest of your site, so they are easy to manage and come with all the comfort and advantages of working with Netlify. Wanna dig in? Here’s a tutorial by Alex MacArthur that goes deep.

Identity

Do you need to log in to your website for admin purposes? Or have users log in? With Identity, Netlify gives you a really easy way to make that happen. Imagine a feature like a gym website offering a food log for members. The member could log in with Google/Twitter/etc and save/view/edit their food data (via cloud functions of course!).

Social login is a handy feature, but it’s not required. You can manage and authenticate users that aren’t Netlify users or users of any other service. You’ll be able to handle log in, sign up, password recovery and all that. Very useful for gated content, site administration, and integrating with any service that understands JSON Web Tokens.

All on Netlify

All those things without having to go out, evaluate and purchase tools or customize open source tools, integrate them into your project, and then manage multiple disparate accounts/services.

How much does it all cost? There’s a good chance it doesn’t cost you anything. Small projects probably fit within Netlify’s free tier. If you grow up and build something big, they you might get into a paid tier, but still good news, you only pay for what you use.

Go check out Netlify right now.

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